Recently, many studies have been actively conducted in the cellular level owing to rapid development in the field of molecular biology, tissue engineering, genetic engineering, etc., and therefore there has been an increasing demand for cell culture. In the field of the tissue engineering, cell was, for example, cultured in vitro, and then the cultured cell was used for regenerating injured biological tissues of the human body such as muscular tissues, organs, etc., and developing artificial organs, etc. In the field of the medicine, the cell culture techniques have been used for developing bioactive compounds, medical supplies, etc. using proteins generated in the cultured cell. In these studies, the cell culture is necessarily required for increasing the cell counts, and there has been especially an increasing demand for effective cell culture in order to obtain antibodies, antigens, bioactive compounds, etc. from the cultured cell.
Such a cell culture technique may be also used for treating cancer in patients. Selecting a chemotherapy that has low side effects on patients and an excellent ability to suppress tumor cell growth is important to effectively treat cancer in the malignant tumor patients. It is very important to select anti-cancer drugs that can reduce the side effects and effectively suppress the tumor cell growth because anti-cancer drugs exhibits a different reaction level to the histopathologically identical category of the cancers according to the patients and damages hematopoietic cell of the bone marrow, hair-root cell, etc. which divide and grow rapidly among the normal cells. Therefore, there have been many attempts to culture the cancer cells as there has been an increasing demand for a susceptibility test of cancer cell on an anti-cancer drug in individual cancer patients, and also mechanisms of diseases (cancer cells) should be elucidated to effectively conduct a study to develop a novel drug such as anti-cancer drug, and sufficient amount of the cancer cell should be required for evaluating efficiency of the novel anti-cancer drug. There have been many studies on cancer cell culture, culture media, culture mesh, etc. for these purposes.
In the 1970's, the susceptibility test on the anti-cancer drug has been conducted with success of the in vitro culture of multiple myeloma using a double semisolid agar culture system by Hamburger and Salmon, but the culture system has problems that it has a low plating efficiency, a low cancer cell growth rate, etc.
Generally, if cell grows on a surface of a petri dish, then the cell does not grow any longer after it grows to a constant size, and therefore and it has a very low growth rate. In order to solve the problem, there has been a demand for a mesh for 3-D cell culture, more preferably a mesh for 3-D cell culture having a large specific surface area so that the cell can easily attach onto the mesh.
The conventional meshes for 3-D cell culture has disadvantages that its cell adhesion to the cell is not so excellent, as well as its specific surface area is not so large. Especially, a sponge-type mesh for cell culture, manufactured with collagen as a main component, has problems that the sponge-type mesh is deformed since it swells up in a culture medium, and the enzyme collagenase was used to remove collagen between the cultured cells to obtain the cell. Also, the meshes, generally used for the conventional 3-D cell cultures, have a problem that it is difficult to smoothly supply nutrients since its pores are not connected smoothly even if it is porous. Particularly due to the problem, it has problems that it is difficult to culture a cancer cell that grows very rapidly when compared to the general normal cells, and the cancer cell has a low growth rate.